Community, school board express broad support for new secondary school

Sounds like the secondary committee did a good job at evaluating our situation and arriving at reasonable conclusions. I and other Barron Park parents don’t feel the same about the recommendations the elementary committee made that will basically gut Barron Park Elementary and impact our other school, Juana Briones, making BPE a choice school for the whole town, forcing our kids out of our neighborhood school, and filling our safe routes with many hundreds more cars a day while refusing to open another elementary school though current and near future enrollment supports doing so.

There has been no input sought from Barron Park people about any of this. The harm these recommendations will do to BPE students is terrible, at the most diverse school in the district. If the Maybell rebellion was any indication, people in Barron park will resist mightly and with good reason. Open another school to address elementary overcrowding and let BPE continue to progress.

I remember all this being discussed at some length when my present senior was in 2nd grade.

Please implement this now before another 2nd grader becomes a senior.

@Paly Parent

Triple-like your comment!

It is time for action and not for another endless cycle of discussion and debate while kids continue to fall through the cracks or receive a PAUSD education that could be so much better. Everyone should go read the report.

Fabulous idea. When schools get too big, really special kids get lost or plowed under. The idea of trying something a little different is also great. Thanks. My kids are way out of PA schools but the schools in my community still matter.

@MI,
With all due respect, there will not be 2100 cars. At Gunn and Paly, half the kids bike already.

The district may talk a big game about innovating, but all the internal politics add up to making them big chickens (dinosaurs) in fact. The only way they will open a 3rd high school is if there is a choice program. It has the advantage of not forcing anyone out of their designated school that they bought that expensive house to be near. But a choice program also allows the district to try things it would be scared to try at Gunn or Paly, also a good thing. The answer to a problem – like choice programs emding up exclusive – is to solve it, not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Critics of MI have a point that we never got FLES, but in the years since MI came in, who of them made the efforts of the MI group in getting MI, to make FLES happen? You might feel it shouldn’t have been necessary, and that may be true, but this is the real world. If you want the district to change, you have to put in the effort.

And I don’t mean just volunteering, because it’s clear there are very few mechanisms to move the district to act even when it’s a matter of life and death. I mean doing what the Maybell neighbors did and changing the law, in the schools case that means creating the ability to change the law so that there are healthy mechanisms and checks and balances. You should be able to expect that if a choice program becomes exclusive, that you can do something swift and effective about it (i.e., more than just talking to the hand at 25 Churchll at board meetings). That ability currently does not exist – but it can be created. In fact, it is sorely needed and overdue. Creating it will not be easy. But giving the community more leverage and checks and balances is not only good for our district, it would allow the community to expect that concerns like yours expressed above will be addressed, because community members have the power to do so. If you want the power to do that, though, that mechanism has to be created. It doesnt currently exist such as at state and city level.

The traffic part of this argument is a swings and roundabouts situation. Some will travel further by car, others will be able to walk or bike.

Don’t worry about where deckchairs are placed on the Titanic.

I am a resident of Green meadow, and I have a child attending PAUSD. I live right behind Cubberley, and I fully support a middle/high school in this location.

I don’t think the traffic in Green meadow is going to be significantly worse than it already is. ( Try driving through Nelson drive during a soccer game pickup/drop off, you will see what I mean) Plus, most kids in middle/high school bike – even if they live at the other end of the town.

We need more schools like Ohlone. There is always Gunn & Paly for those who want to push themselves. However some of us just need a peaceful existence.

Hoping the board will act fast on this proposal.

Calling BS,

Hmmm, I know people who live in Greenmeadow who have their kids attend choice programs and would be happy to have one at Cubberley.

Lot of misinformation in this thread–it’s not 1050 kids, it’s 150–so, no, not a huge traffic impact–particularly as a number of the kids would live within walking/biking distance. This is, after all, an area that’s seen a lot of growth in enrollment. By making it a choice program, people who want their kids to go to Gunn will have that option.

*If* the program is successful and becomes more in demand, I think it makes complete sense to give families in the Cubberley draw area priority enrollment.

This is not like Mandarin Immersion–MI took up classroom space at a school with a long waiting list that had been approved for a half-strand expansion and led to a gigantic elementary. The Cubberley proposal is a way of using new space and relieving some of the overcrowding at the middle and high schools–and by having families volunteer to be part of this experiment instead of forcing people into it.

That said, I’m glad Dauber’s still talking about the elementary school–no, Max, it is *not* okay to have mega-elementaries. It is *not* okay to pretend there won’t be growth at the elementary-school level when there’s tremendous pressure on Palo Alto to accommodate more residents.

Just a note that the recommendations included two prongs. The new school AND a recommendation to create “houses” at existing schools to better connect the students to other students and teachers, relieve academic pressure, and extend project-based learning.

A new school would benefit the whole district, if done right. Teachers can share learning extend successful programs to other schools. I frequently hear that other elementary schools now focus on SEL because it has been so successful at Ohlone.

I agree that I would prefer a district that could meet everybody’s needs, rather than creating a culture of winners and losers. Let’s expand the desired programs to meet those needs.

I will support a neighborhood school instead of choice school. This will allow local south east PA kids to go to a nearby school. I remember my kids used to bike to Gunn, but it is far especially in a raining day or late in school due to activities. If it is a local school, it can also reduce the traffic to Gunn which is really bad in the morning.

They did in fact say that they want this BOLD INNOVATIVE BOLD BOLD school in part to prevent “our best students from leaving the district.” It’s unreasonable to delete it because it’s true that it was said. And it was repugnant. That is an argument right there to NOT make it a choice school. That was horrible and offensive. And it was said. Go review your notes or ask someone who paid attention.

@Slow Down,
“Smaller schools should mean more direct personal relationships with teachers and school administrators. Ideally, you should never even have to deal with the district office, but overcrowded unresponsive schools is one reason that is having to happen now.”

When your child has to have any kind of accommodation, for health, for disability, for learning differences, you deal with the district office. People who have the power to take out their personal grievances can make life hell for children and parents by influencing the teachers and school administrators, and interfering with every interaction. This has nothing to do with school size, but with an unhealthy administration in which school personnel have too much power and little to no accountability. This will not improve with a third high school. The schools need to be smaller for lots of reasons, but the trust problem I am speaking of is not one of the negatives that will be fixed. You and I are both speaking about trust, but we are speaking about different things.

@JLS Connections Parent – The size comes from slide 40 of the presentation to the Board.
“Start with 100-150 students per grade = 700 -1050 total size. This is roughly 1/8 or 12%of our current secondary school enrollment”

@Lisa

> There has been no input sought from Barron Park people about any of this.

That’s not true. Ms Olbrich is on the EMAC, lives in Barron Park and is a PiE chair at BPES. She and two other EMAC members in their “minority response” recommended maintaining JB/BPES as neighborhood schools. They propose is to open both to intra-district transfers. That doesn’t make sense to me, since this would obviously add more out of area car trips.

> people in Barron park will resist mightly and with good reason

Read the EMAC report linked in the Weekly’s article. They give a pretty blunt answer to the Board’s questions and your criticism. Essentially, you’ve got to convince the 47% of kids that pick choice programs over BPES that they should stay at Barron Park. Here’s what they say: “BPES is a choice program, it’s YOUR LAST CHOICE.” (page 17)

If you can convince Barron Park families that the school is worth attending, maybe you’ll have a chance. We sent our kids to Barron Park and took them out, one of them in mid-semester.

This is a very misleading use of data by the people who want to turn BP into a choice school. The kids who go to choice schools from Barron Park are those from Ventura who live on the other side of El Camino and they go to Hoover, which is very nearby and they don’t have to cross El Camino. That’s all but just a few.

>> The kids who go to choice schools from Barron Park are those from Ventura who live on the other side of El Camino and they go to Hoover, which is very nearby and they don’t have to cross El Camino.

Oh my gosh! How broken is our school district that they have elementary kids crossing El Camino Real to get to their “neighborhood” school!!!!

STOP DEDICATING ENTIRE SCHOOL SITES TO CHOICE PROGRAMS!

I am concerned about opening a new small middle school at Cubberley. Our middle schools are extremely overcrowded. Yet Dr. McGee is not proposing to open a new middle school of a normal size (600-700 students) to relieve that overcrowding. He is proposing a 450 student middle school (150 per grade). The numbers posted above are incorrect.

450 students will do nothing to relieve the overcrowding in our current middle schools, which are bursting.

Then he proposes a 600 student high school. Yet our high schools just finished a massive building campaign that made them larger. They are not overcrowded at all. So this is not necessary.

This seems like the wrong proposal entirely and it is so wrong that I wonder where it came from.

— we need a full size middle school, which is not a choice program. We have to relieve overcrowding at the current 3 middle schools. That means we need to get more than 450 students out of there, and we need to do it not by sending cars to Cubberley and snarling traffic for commuters trying to get to the 101 along Charleston and San Antonio.

— we need no new high school. We need to fix the 2 high schools we have. I agree that these high schools are to big and we shouldn’t have built them larger but should have opened a third comprehensive high school at Cubberlely long ago. But that ship sailed when Townsend and Caswell and their ilk voted to use the bond money to enlarge Gunn and Paly. They were greedy for the rental income from Cubberley and they made a bad call. That is irreversible unless you want to take a wrecking ball to the new construction over there.

— A new vanity high school might be a “nice to have” but it is not a “must have” like a new full size middle school.

Our high schools have serious issues. It is a terrible waste of management time and attention to go chasing after the shiny new penny of a new, essentially charter or semi-private choice high school when we have zero college ready black students and counseling programs that are terrible by everyone’s admission at Gunn. There are real and serious problems to fix and this will be a giant distraction for an unnecessary end.

If parents are voting with their feet and exiting for private school let’s fix the high schools we have not build these advantaged individuals a new school we don’t need.

— we need at least one new elementary school to relieve overcrowding at Palo Verde and in the south cluster. That should also be at Greendell/Cubberley.

When you really take a step back and look at what the document need is and what is being proposed, it is pretty shocking.

–We have documented need for a new middle school. Yet what is being proposed will serve only 450 students selected by lottery. This will leave our three current middle schools at the very top of the “acceptable” size range — too large.

–We have a documented need for at least one and maybe 2 elementary schools. This proposal dumps portables on the playground at Nixon and kicks the can down the road.

–We have no documented need for a new high school. Yet this plan diverts district resources into a new third high school of 600 students, also picked by lottery and leaves the rest of them to their fate. Do you think that once 300 students are subtracted from Gunn and Paly that class sizes will fall? No, they will fire those teachers. They don’t want them at the new school — this is going to be “BOLD” and “NEW” with entirely new teachers etc. So your students will be in the same size classes but in a larger now somewhat empty building getting the same outdated curriculum and the same racially biased outcomes with the same terrible counseling. All the good things will be across town for the lucky lotto winners.

This is not what public schools are supposed to do and if this school board approves this self-aggrandizing proposal by McGee they should all be recalled. This is a waste of taxpayer dollars in the service of one man’s vanity project.

BP Parent,

Thank you for the info about Ventura–yes, it makes sense that families there would apply for a choice school when their neighborhood school isn’t in the neighborhood–it’s a shame that the district sold the Ventura site–it’s fairly central and could handle some of the south cluster issues as well as keeping kids from having to cross El Camino.

However, a small middle school of 450 kids would, indeed, alleviate the crowding at the middle schools and get all of them under a thousand kids, which I believe is the district’s goal. A small high school of 600 kids would get Gunn and Paly under 2,000 students (new construction doesn’t create a bigger campus or make it easier to monitor 2,000 kids–so, yes, the district *does* need a new high school. Remember, the kids who filled our elementary schools to bursting are now on their way to the upper grades.) Kids who aren’t at the new schools would still benefit from being at less crowded schools.

Like the middle and high schools, we still have several oversized elementaries, so while there may not be tons of growth in the future (though never say never as far as Palo Alto is concerned), we need a 13th elementary and have for several years. I’m still interested in Ken Dauber’s suggestion–move the immersion students to Garland (since there’s extra room at Duveneck now and no place to build dense housing in the Garland draw area). This frees up Escondido for the incoming Stanford housing and frees up space at Ohlone which could then be used for kids in the neighborhood.

The report says that a 13th elementary would cost a bit over a million annually to run. I’d think with our runaway housing prices and, thus, rising property tax base that this is doable in PA and should have been done years ago.

One last practical note–Silicon Valley types are big on changing education right now–it’s pretty clear that there’s some funding for a project-based learning school–I’d say getting more classrooms is worth the trade-off of choice v. neighborhood high schools–particularly the desirability of our regular high schools. I don’t see a huge loss here for anyone–though traffic management needs to be improved. That’s doable though and a south cluster high school would probably reduce Arastradero/Charleston traffic to Gunn.

I just was sent this facebook link — it is circulating wildly right now on many different email groups.

https://www.facebook.com/Palo-Alto-Supports-a-New-6-12-Public-School-1680449545500472/

It seems that the EMAC secondary subcommittee (including our Superintendent Max McGee) have already been working behind the scenes for months on this new school, which already has a name — “Wayfinder.” The design task force McGee is “asking” the board to “appoint” already exists and already has designed the school. The whole thing is very odd.

Apparently some wealthy VCs were already working on this Wayfinder as a Charter or private school and then they got McGee to agree to do their school behind the scenes. An application was already filed describing both the problems with the district’s existing schools (which is a pretty upsetting read) and the need for this new school and what it would look like with a lot of specifics — and a grant proposal submitted.

It’s all on facebook, including the fact that McGee was an author of this report and is identified as part of the Wayfinder “team) (which appears to be headed by wealthy VCs and charter school advocates).

Without getting into the specifics of their proposal, this process is broken. McGee is actively urging the public to lobby the school board — he’s hosting something called an “Innovation Town Hall” to push for this private Wayfinder proposal being funded by our tax dollars — 70M plus millions annually in operating costs. This is unbelievable. You have to see this to believe it.

In the proposal, McGee says that our schools have only paid “lip service” to the suicides (not clear how this VC wet dream “Wayfinder” is going to prevent suicide, but if he really thinks that, why isn’t he doing more, since he is the man in charge). He also says we are doing a bad job with minority students. No argument there, but why open a new choice school to solve that problem?

What kind of process is this? Does the school board just rubber stamp a $70M basically private school pitched by a bunch of rich VCs behind the board’s back? Did the board know but keep it from the public? I don’t see any mention of this in any of the prior articles about the EMAC or board meetings. Is it possible that a whole private school initiative being backed by a bunch of rich VCs and pitched to the Super and a whole grant proposal for private money was written by McGee and the board didn’t even know?

There is a major process and governance issue breakdown here. And I personally am not happy with the language in this proposal that McGee was an author of — it is very denigratory of our district and our teachers. What about the teachers? This proposal says that the teachers’ union contract with be “flexible.” Was the union involved or consulted? What about parents? What about students?

What I also don’t understand is all the people who support this who seem to think that their kids are going to get to go to this school. I get that you are rich, but has McGee promised people preferences in the lottery in exchange for money?

How can we be this far down the road in the planning and the public does not know it? Why is McGee asking the board to appoint a task force to do what he already did? That’s just weird.

The next round of proposal is due Feb. 1. It seems like there must have been a Brown Act violation because McGee must have consulted the board members and known that they were going to go along with this, in order to get this far down the road with it. The whole thing smells like a backroom deal — it reminds me of the City Council and Arrillaga. is the Weekly going to investigate? When? This “Innovation Town Hall” is scheduled for next week. Better get going.

I have so many questions right now. If McGee didn’t tell the board about this I think he should be terminated. The EMAC appears to have been hijacked by these private interests and private money. There was a backroom deal. This is just really unbelievable.

Even if I liked the idea (and of course I don’t even know about it not being a billionaire I did not get the special Max McGee treatment and did not get the memo) I don’t think this process is fair or inclusive. If this goes through we should recall the board and fire McGee and start over.

Yes it’s right here on the facebook group. https://www.facebook.com/1680449545500472/photos/ms.c.eJxFztsNgFAIA9CNDO9L91~;MaBV~_T0qLVktkdHW72~;FLP~_gMAN4LplUlOXCYwAI77AfICzUJGDt0gR0xoIRZgfNEFpiYT1GETTRndwVvws7CU5rYWfBEbogPN5c~-.bps.a.1680454865499940.1073741827.1680449545500472/1680454868833273/?type=3&theater

Does anyone know how this happened? Has the public already been told about this Wayfinder school and the “XQ” application and I just missed it? I googled around for it and I don’t see anything about Wayfinder on paloaltoonline.

However, looking at the application you can tell who is behind it and it looks like McGee, the members of the EMAC, a bunch of Charter School people like Jennifer Carolan from Bullis Charter School, some VCs, etc. There is clearly a PR campaign to sell the public and the board on Wayfinder in a very professional and advanced stage.

I feel confused about what McGee is up to. This application says for example that the school board political process is characterized by “inertia,” and unable to innovate. Is that something the super should be saying? Seems imprudent.

What really bothers me though is the way this application uses the suicides to pitch for this VC school. It says “Tragically at least 10 Palo Alto teens have taken their own lives in the past decade, including 4 during the 2014-15 school year. We must do something to create a school and community culture that values the mental health of our students — not just pay lip service to it.”

OK. Wow.

Max McGee is an author of this document. Max McGee is the superintendent of schools. If Max McGee believes that the schools have not done enough to prevent suicide, and is only giving it lip service, why isn’t Max McGee doing a better job at it. Why isn’t Max McGee shouting from the rooftops that he needs more money, more whatever he needs to do more? I missed that part of the board meeeting.

This is not very well thought out, to say the least.

Does anyone want to give more information about what is going on with this? I am personally really interested in knowing whether the public was told about this, when the decision was made, what the role of these very rich VCs has been?

This seems like 27 University all over again. Secret deals with rich people. Lots of these government employees get stars in their eyes when they get to sit down with the billionaires. They think that they are getting to be Queen for a Day.

The “Wayfinder” facebook page says that “We’re gathering support for a new PAUSD secondary school designed to address the root of the problems facing our community.”

What are the “root problems” that this new choice school will solve? Is this about suicide? The XQ application talks more about suicide than anything else so I am assuming it is. What about this new choice school will solve the suicide problem? I don’t see the relationship between this and suicide. What other “root problems”?

Why is McGee posting to facebook about PAUSD’s “root problems”? Does anyone else think that is weird?

I just finished a close reading of the XQ application that Max and the EMAC committee filed. It is full of revealing information. Just a few points of interest here.

Page 1. The proposal starts out by praising charter schools as “more nimble and innovative” and contrasts charter schools favorably to “our seemingly impervious traditional public education system.” The application says that the reason for the PAUSD application is so that “we might bring innovation to Palo Alto Unified’s more than 12000 students.”

There is much to critique in just the first few sentences. First, the praise for charter schools as opposed to our district is really worrisome given that it is coming from the head of our district. I feel like I could and should just stop there and the board should now fire him. But I’ll continue. Max evidently feels that a charter-like school such as PAUSD’s proposed Wayfinder school is needed to “bring innovation” to PAUSD’s “12,000 students.” But even if it is true that this is the only way to “bring innovation” to our students trapped in our “traditional” system, this charterish application will bring it to 12% of our 4000 high school students at most.

Page 2. The application says that minority and poor students in PAUSD are “relegated to lower academic tracks” while affluent students “cannot find meaning in the ever more grueling arms race of AP tests . . and siloed courses designed for the industrial revolution.”

Wow Ok. That’s a pretty grim picture of our high schools being painted by our superintendent. Fair to assume that this is Max McGee’s diagnosis of PAUSD after his one year of being here.

If you agree with McGee’s diagnoses that our school is hidebound, our teachers are horrible and cannot innovate, our minority students are screwed, and our rich students are being driven to suicide (page 4) — why is McGee’s prescription to build a school for 500 self-selected students? I am a bit confused reading this searing indictment of our schools by the Chief Executive of those schools — the person who is being indicted.

Page 2. The PAUSD/Wayfinder proposal says that the new school will ‘bring progressive and unfamiliar innovation to a community and school board political process where inertia and conservatism” are the rule.

Should the superintendent be criticizing the board in a public document like this? This struck me as very very impolitic to say the least.

The real issue here is not the board, it is that in school governance (unlike in Venture Capital), the process is democratic and open. A governmental planning process proceeds slowly because of the requirement of inclusivity. There was not a single teacher on this committee nor any principals nor any students. This proposal was never even exposed for public comment. This is not how a planning process for a transparent, open government works. that requirement of time-consuming process isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s democracy. Sorry Kevin Efrusy and Mark Romer and your billionare buddies if that is taking too long for your kids to get into the shiny new thing you want the government to build for you but that is what democratic government is. Not a bug. A feature.

page 3. PAUSD/Wayfinder Billionaire Boys Club members think that it is not just a school, it’s a “moral obligation” to bring their idea to life. With or without the democratically elected leaders of the district — our disobedience of the law and process and circumventing of the rules is a moral obligation. We are stealing medicine to save our sick child. Can’t you see why this is ethical even when it appears unethical and even borderline illegal? No? Well you just aren’t visionary enuf.

Don’t worry, they plan to “rely heavily on stakeholder input” after they do the proposal. You can weigh in after the fact. It will be almost as good. Just put your rubber stamp right here. Sign with an X.

page 3. PAUSD is already sending out a survey to our 4000 high school students “to hear their thoughts about the Wayfinder school” and will “conduct one on one interviews and focus groups with teens at both our current high schools” about this even though the board has not even approved it. See above, the board must be circumvented, it’s a “moral obligation.”

page 4. This new PAUSD/Wayfinder school will stop teen suicide. All we have done so far, according to McGee and his billionaire buddies, is give the issue “lip service.” Right now we don’t “truly understand the needs of our students.” Here is where Max McGee and the Wayfinder group blame the schools for the suicide cluster. This is bizarre, since McGee himself is the guy running the response and if he thinks that he is only giving it lip service, he should stop that and do more. I wish that guy McGee would “value the mental health of our students and not just pay lip service to it.” That’s me. I wish I, Max McGee would stop that. If you are worried about logic, you are reading the wrong document.

There are no counselors or mental health professionals on the committee, and no evidence that “Wayfinder” with its bucket of edupspeak design jargon will prevent a single suicide, let alone the 10 it cynically leverages in this document. All the post-it-notes in the world from the d-school won’t create any evidence for suicide prevention. Here, Max write this on a post it note for your “design thinking”: “don’t use the suicides for your own purposes. It’s gross.”

page 4. “We’re conducted focus groups with teachers and administrators at both of our high schools and their support for a new, more innovative high school is high.” Actually the EMAC talked to two teachers. This isn’t true, but if you wan’t the truth, you are reading the wrong document. This is the one about “moral obligation.”

page 4. The document includes loads of names of luminaries and their corporate names claiming that they are on board, will help, and just generally implying that they are part of the team. According to XQ insider, you have to have written permission from everyone you name and all corporate intellectual property: I am assuming that Lazlo Block, Google, High Tech High, Devin Vodicka, Sal Khan, Stanford University, Challenge Success, Tesla and Pixar all provided the required documentation. Stanford will excited to learn that it was represented as essentially a sponsor of this project with a “vested interest” (page 5) in it. OK. Wow.

Page 8. Guess what City of Palo Alto — you’re famous too! You are going to help redesign Cubberley for this. You didn’t know that you were foregoing an appropriate public planning process I bet. You want to follow the law? This document is not for people interested in things like boring old CEQA. Forget you. That’s the past. This is a “moral obligation.”

I read the stuff. Thanks to those posting here. Mind. Blown. Now what? how is it even possible this happened without the board being informed. I always thought they were bad but wow. Just wow.

My two cents is I am very happy with the schools and I am not sure we need another choice school. Less homework would be nice though.

Dear XQ insider,
Could you please email those screen shots to the PAUSD school board? Thank you for making the public aware of how the Superintendent and the EMAC committee members inappropriately chose not to disclose their affiliation with the Wayfinder school and the details of the Wayfinder proposal. I hope that the Weekly will further investigate this story and that the district will respond by delaying the school board vote on the EMAC proposal to build the new school until the public is fully aware of how this proposal came about.

Now they have removed the XQ application from the facebook group. I have a screenshot, also sent to me. At 3:48 today it read:

“We intend the new Palo Alto School to be part of the national movement to innovate secondary education. For example, this album contains our application for the XQ project.” And then it included the entire 16 page application. Which is now gone.

The interesting thing about this fact, is that it associated the EMAC and Max McGee with the facebook group and with the Wayfinder school initiative, since the facebook group is maintained by the Wayfinder people,, points to the Wayfinder website, and refers to the application (of which McGee and all the members of the secondary EMAC committee are Team members and authors) as “our application for the XQ project.”

I am not sure what removing it nets them. It just makes them look guilty.

The EMAC as a group fraudulently misrepresented their findings to the school board during the meeting on 9/28. In that meeting, a powerpoint was presented (that is still posted to this facebook page and is probably also somewhere in a board packet on the district website). This entire more than 70 slides doesn’t ever mention the history of the Wayfinder group coming to Max and the EMAC, pitching their idea, being adopted, adding Romer to the committee, and then the decision to pitch Wayfinder as a district school, merge the objectives of the two groups, and enter the XQ Contest. Not a word.

Where it should be mentioned is on Slide 3: https://www.facebook.com/1680449545500472/photos/pb.1680449545500472.-2207520000.1448253365./1680455735499853/?type=3&theater

Slide 3 is titled “EMAC information sources” and it does not mention Kevin Efrusy, Mark Romer, their powerpoint (even though it was presented to the EMAC and became essentially the charter of the group, replacing the board-drafted charge). This is where the lie to the board was told by Joe Lee, Mark Romer, Max McGee, and the rest of the group that sat there through more than 2 hours of presentation (and then another board meeting on the same topic) and never even uttered a word about this source of information.

Incidentally this slide also says that they only consulted 2 teachers (both at Gunn) before deciding that teachers in the district can’t innovate without a $70M new school paid for by taxpayer money. That is outrageous and the board should have simply rejected this proposal out of hand and also realized something was afoot. So we have here a proposal that concludes that our high schools are unfixable, that our teachers cannot innovate or implement innovative programming and that is based on talking to 2 teachers, 28 parents (only ~8 of whom are in secondary school, not stated how many in high schools), and 32 high school students. Yet 20 parents showed up to praise the conclusion that our schools are horrible centers of stultifying non-innovation. The board should have smelled a rat, especially the way the parents were all winking about the vast sums of donated money “waiting in the wings.”

It is hard to know where this goes from here. Max McGee appears to have engaged a group of citizens on a board committee in a decision to fail to disclose key pertinent information to the board and then there were two board meetings in which nothing about this was said. A school has been designed, A design task force has already been meeting with Max’s involvement in secret and without having been approved by the board. They submitted a grant proposal, and then started a facebook page aimed at promoting their school and lobbying the board to approve post-hoc what they already are doing.

I am not sure how to retain a Superintendent who would engage in that kind of conduct. There will be a lot of internal pressure on the board to try to find a way that this isn’t as bad as it looks and to allow Max to pretend that he didn’t do what he clearly did. From the perspective of governance, I am not sure that is the right idea. If you have a CEO who misleads the board and also engages other employees and reports in misleading the board you may just get more trouble down the line unless you deal sternly and clearly with that kind of situation. If you don’t you are certain to get more of the same. If the misleading conduct is about whether he fudged his expense account once or twice, maybe that is not so bad. When it something of this magnitude I don’t believe looking the other way is in the cards. If the board allows him to get away with this they can look forward to being misled about big things a lot more.

@Sharon,
Regardless of how much I agree with you about fairness, the only way to get a project-based high school is to open one from scratch. There are too many philosophical differences across school populations. If the choice is very popular, it can quickly be moved to the other schools.

That said, I’m still having trouble with the fact that we asked for independent study for part of the day, and were told the district couldn’t allow us to do that because pretty soon everyone else would want to and they even took independent study out of the catalog. They refused to give any information whatsoever about independent study practices in the district so we could at least understand the standard, despite informal and formal records requests. (I can’t think of a single request for information, even student records, even when a child’s safety is at issue, that has been properly filled by the district. Who enforces those laws, btw??) There are indeed many private schools in the area for billionaires. Well, you do shed a new light on McGee’s wanting his own lawyer with him in the office, @XQ.

Choice for the few,

Do you know how this proposal for a brand new choice middle and high school campus at Cubberley squares with the enrollment committee’s parent survey results that it shared in its report to the school board which says the opposite?

“New School or Not? Parents expressed desire to expand choice programs within our existing secondary schools, as opposed to delivering choice programs at a new expansion campus”

New school: 24% support
School within existing school: 76% support

Can anyone tell me where I can find the EMAC report online? I would like to take a look at who was on the committee and what they recommended. Will this take money away from Paly and Gunn? I ask because it seems like it would be hard to have a small school for the same per-student cost that we spend at a large school. Does the report explain the economics of that?

Hey, I’ve got a good idea – rather than build and staff a new school with a high staffing level, let’s just hire more teachers/staff at our current schools and give every student a lower ratio. I can’t figure out why we have money to spend on new schools and new programs, but can’t spent that same money to make our current schools and current programs better.

Concerned Parent,

PAUSD on private fundraising to cover costs: “While some of the [financial] impact [of building and running a new school] may be mitigated by private funding, the impact is significant and uncertain until funds are raised.”

http://www.pausd.org/sites/default/files/pdm-meeting/materials/mb20151102_pkt_spcl.pdf

Duveneck mom,

PAUSD’s estimate for a school housing 1,000 middle and high school students at Cubberley:

$65-$70 million for construction (paid out of the Bond Fund and/or the capital funds)

plus

about $2 million/year in operational costs in addition to per student funding (for administrative and support staffing and utilities, from the general fund)

plus

$5.5 million/year in lost rental income (at the current rate).

http://www.pausd.org/sites/default/files/pdm-meeting/materials/mb20151102_pkt_spcl.pdf

Good idea,

PAUSD’s estimate of the cost of reducing class size by one (1) student for all middle and high school students:

Jordan, Terman and JLS which have about 26 (core) and 28.5 students/teacher (non core) now – $375,000/year/student reduction

Paly and Gunn which have about 28.5 students/teacher with lower grade core classes at 22 students/teacher now – $750,000/year/student reduction

http://www.pausd.org/sites/default/files/pdm-meeting/materials/mb20151102_pkt_spcl.pdf

$7.5 million/year applied to class size reduction would lower the size of every class taught on those five campuses by 6 or 7 students.

@confused – thanks for those. That seems like quite a substantial reduction, esp since some classes would benefit more than others (e.g., gym and choir would not be as critical), and in fact you could put two teachers in some classrooms to facilitate individualize and small group instruction. This sounds like a good set of things to look at – did the EMAC consider them?

Waylost,

Thanks for the link to XQ’s application.

It is an interesting read, especially its promise of a tight relationship with the Stanford Education School whose faculty has already had a hand in designing this new school.

It reads as if the Stanford Education School will provide the school, once established, with its “leading thinkers in K-12 education” too.

Here’s a tale that suggests caution may be warranted before PAUSD goes too far down the road on this, which should be especially concerning to our low income and minority families caught in the achievement gap.

The Stanford Education School designed and ran the “Stanford New School” in East Palo Alto. A decade after it opened, the Ravenswood City School Board closed it for poor performance.

Founded by Stanford Education School Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, a leader in the education reform movement and an education advisor to President Obama, the school enrolled 521 students Kindergarten through 12th grade and was funded with $3,000 per student above the state average.

After 10 years of trying, 84% of the students were not proficient in English and math, placing Stanford’s charter school in the state’s lowest 20%, even lower the other East Palo Alto school with similar demographics.

New York Times’ reporting 10 years after it opened, at the time of its closing:

“Starting a new school Dr. Stipek [dean of the Stanford School of Education and president of the charter school’s board] said, ‘takes time.'”

“Stanford’s educators expected that with excellent teachers, many trained at the university, they could provide state-of-the- art instruction, preparing students to become ‘global citizens.’”

“despite the … benefits that a great university can provide…Stanford New School was not able to become the national model that the School of Education set out to create”

There are similarities in what Stanford tried then and what this new school says it is going to do with Stanford Education School’s help.

*Goal

Will inspire students to take on the challenges of the 21st century (proposed new school)

Is “preparing students to become ‘global citizens’” (Stanford Education School’s now closed charter school)

*Teaching Approach

Project-based learning (proposed new school)

Project-based learning was the “backbone” of its learning environment (Stanford Education School’s now closed charter school)

*Demographics

Will provide an opportunity to close the achievement gap in new and innovative ways for underrepresented minority and under-resourced students that will be a model for other schools in the nation (proposed new school)

Hoped to become the national model for low income and minority students (Stanford Education School’s now closed charter school)

*Tapping into Stanford experts

Professor Jo Boaler, whose book on creative math education that the new school’s design team highlights as the inspiring ideas that the new school will be built upon, is helping the team design the new school (proposed new school)

Stanford professors brought “advice, support and novel learning opportunities” such as Professor Jo Boaler who brought her “nationally celebrated math strategies to the school” (Stanford Education School’s now closed charter school)

*Using outside advisors too

Will engage experts from Silicon Valley corporations such as Google (proposed new school)

Its board included Google employees (Stanford Education School’s now closed charter school)

*High school courses that won’t be offered

No APs (proposed new school)

1 AP (Stanford Education School’s now closed charter school)

*Grading

Will have “novel” transcripts (proposed new school)

“Students receive a rubric of evaluations, not grades” (Stanford Education School’s now closed charter school)

*Mental Health

Will address, not give “lip-service” to, serious mental health issues mentioning that 25% of PAUSD’s current high school students are sad or depressed (proposed new school)

Focused intently and intentionally on “students’ emotional and social lives,” ten years after opening 50% of its high school students accessed some form of mental health support noting that the “demand for these counseling sessions has been high.” (Stanford Education School’s now closed charter school)

http://www.nytimes. com/2010/ 04/16/education/ 16sfcharter. html?ref= education
http://www.epaahs.org/sites/default/files/EPAA_YearEndReport_2013_FINAL.pdf
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/media/reports/1448309158.pdf

McGee is holding a gun to the heads of the board and PAEA. He should be terminated. He’s dishonest and shady.

@And so,
I doubt very much there will be any union busting. The last thing this district does is mind the store on salaries. Look at admin costs here. District office employees aren’t unionized and there doesn’t seem to be anything that triggers pay reduction, personnel reduction, or judgment of poor performance. McGee is too smart to tick off all the teachers in the rest of the district who will fear they are next.

@Choice for the few,
I hear you, but it’s hard for me to get worked up about opposing something I see as at least a positive outcome when my family has been subjected to all those things over personal and less worthy ends. You want to ferret out the rot, make some substantial free legal services available so parents have help to get records out of the district, or properly prepare complaints when there is serious malfeasance, especially where there is retaliation that hurts the kids. Giving individuals the resources to solve those problems for their kids will in the end do more to shed light on any secrecy and problems you describe, because those behaviours will be decisively rooted out.

If someone wanted to start a Hoover flavored high school (done well, not the exaggerations) more power to them, IMO. It wouldn’t be for me, but I think a lot of the conflict and stress today comes from putting the Hoover learners in with the Ohlone learners, in a school more on the Hoover end but not serving them well either.

On the other hand, I think the district could do the innovation way better without having to open an expensive school by just beefing up support for independent learning – putting together an office for that with teachers who want to work with independent learners, and granting more flexibility. Kids who wish could cobble together their own individualized programs in part from district classes and in part from resources that best individualize their education. They could incorporate across disciplines to do big projects and endeavors. The district could enroll the kids in a new program so they can keep an eye on whether it’s working without mixing the kids scores in with their coveted test scores. Then the program could expand as needed, because the kids would be going to high school some of the day and using the resources at Gunn and Paly for things like PE and theater, but not for everything. This would have the effect of reducing on campus overcrowding during the day, even though the number of students is essentially the same. It would be a way of innovating and creating an individualized project based program, where kids can easily find each other to collaborate on projects THEY conceive and direct, without the cost and build up of a new school, and it could be made to happen by next fall. (We proposed this to McGee – is it a backroom thing because no one heard about it? Conversations have to start somewhere.)

Yes, you do have good points, but in the system we have which is far from perfect, there are bigger rotten fish to fry and you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I’m a lot more concerned about much more serious practices the public has zero idea about, practices that hurt individual and vulnerable kids and families, and the district has almost zero mechanisms to hold them to account.

There is a facebook group for PAUSD/Wayfinder, which is maintained by the same group that filed the XQ application — a group that includes Max McGee and all the members of the EMAC secondary committee, such as Mark Romer (one of the initial proponents of the Wayfinder school back in the summer) and the wealthy Kevin Efrusy, Charter advocates like Jennifer Carolan of Bullis Charter, and Big Time Charter School guy Alex Terman (on the board of both Leadership Public Schools and Rocketship).

Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/Palo-Alto-Supports-a-New-6-12-Public-School-1680449545500472/?fref=ts

Today on this facebook page, the following message was posted:

URGENT: Before you take off for Thanksgiving, don’t forget to take a minute to email the school board and share your support for moving this concept forward – let them know that you encourage convening a task force to drive and define our next-generation school. It is time for Palo Alto to take a leadership position in public education. Include a shout-out for our superintendent Max McGee for listening to us and lending his support. Email addresses to make it easy for you: mcaswell@pausd.org, hemberling@pausd.org, ctownsend@pausd.org, kdauber@pausd.org, tgodfrey@pausd.org

So here is the nub of the problem. The members of the EMAC committee and the Superintendent, rather than being impartial, objective members of a district committee and staff are engaged in lobbying the board for a particular (and very expensive) goal. The board can’t count on the information being provided by ANY (stress the word ANY) of the people involved in XQ — including the EMAC members and very unfortunately the Superintendent — to be honest brokers of information. They are partisan and are actively lobbying the board and managing public opinion.

This facebook group should come down. it is totally improper for the Superintendent and the members of a district committee that is supposed to be evaluating options and advising the board to be lobbying the board. This also shows how far McGee has gone in communicating his support for the new school to the public.

It is interesting to note that the core of support for the new school comes from Ohlone families. This makes sense given that they very much like this philosophy and are unhappy that it ends after 5th grade. As are the Mandarin and Spanish Immersion choice parents as well. Shall we build a high school for all of them? Shall we build one for Hoover parents too? This is what is wrong with choice schools (aside from traffic and neighborhood disintegration). It creates overblown entitlement.

Many of the families who are lobbying hard for this school are those who can and do go to private schools such as Nueva which offer what they want. Is that a problem? Not for me. I don’t believe that the public schools are required to or should try to “compete” with private schools. Some families choose private school and that is fine. I feel no obligation to prevent that from happening by spending $70M to build them a school.

On the other hand, it is true that for many years we have known that our high schools do not work for some fairly large subset of our students — between a quarter and a third. What should be done about that? Should we improve our existing high schools or throw up our hands and build them a new school? What is the evidence that a smaller school would work better for all or even most of these students? Do they need less structure or more structure? Do they need smaller classes? Because if the new smaller school has the same large class sizes, would it matter? This school is supposed to have a whole day per week of “work” in the community. Would that work for this group of kids? Many of the students who are not succeeding in our high schools have disabilities, particularly ADHD and those on the spectrum. Changes and distractions can be hard for some of these students, as is organization. Can those students do the level of independent research envisioned here? That seems like something requiring proof of concept.

Not everyone will select this school and not everyone will get in. So then what? Do we just throw away 3500 students? “Harry Potter” houses is a fig leaf. It’s insulting to the intelligence of the Palo Alto taxpayer that you want to offer “Harry Potter” houses when it is clear that the Superintendent himself disdains the way teaching and learning occurs in our current schools. WHere are the concrete improvements that we need so that our schools can work for the students who currently do not succeed there? Where are the reforms of teaching, counseling, homework, AP courseloads, and so forth? When is McGee going to enforce the goddamn homework policy?

McGee has a lot of nerve telling the public that he can’t reform Paly and Gunn to make them work for all students who live in their attendance boundaries. I find this enraging. This man makes $300K per year and lives RENT FREE in a $1.5 million condo that the district purchased for him and which he occupies with NO payments, and which he gets to keep half the appreciation on, even though it was purchased with $1.5million in our tax dollars. What exactly is the reason he gets half the appreciation on dollars he did not invest? He also gets a car.

Are we not giving him enough money to investigate who the students are who are failing in our schools and make the changes necessary so that the majority of those students (not 100% but most) are succeeding where they are? I think we are and I think if he doesn’t want that job, the job he was hired for, he should depart.

“Fact: our high schools are huge.” – this is just incorrect. Our high schools are not unusual in size in any way. There are plenty of very good schools our size or larger, around this area and around the country. There are many good smaller high schools too of course. So … no.

“Fact: our high schools don’t work well for each kid” This is true, and a good point. Of course, those kids probably need different things, not just one big alternative program. And there are lots of kids whom we can improve things for, even if they don’t want/need a radically different approach to school.

As for suicide clusters – I sympathize with the concern, but I’m not aware of any evidence that PBL or a smaller school or whatever somehow improves mental health or reduces chances of suicide. I know some think it is just “obvious” but it is not.

@Organiclaws – as we all knows, averages can be misleading or just uninformative. Comparing our schools to lots of rural and urban districts in CA and around the country just seems not relevant. If you compare to other high performing schools, there is a wide band, with many smaller schools, a bunch our size, and some larger. All appear to be successful. It’s not clear why proponents of smaller schools think adding a new campus will automatically address the problems they see. There are schools smaller than ours that have lower academic and connectedness results – so there is no natural law at work. The most likely result will be that we will have the same issues, but at 3 places instead of 2. Sorry, there is no easy fix.

High Tech High is a very exciting and promising school. No one is questioning that idea. But it is a charter school and it operates with private funding sources. It has small class sizes that are much smaller than comparable public schools (around 23:1 and dropping due to the increase in the charter school funding formula passed by Gov. Brown two years ago). It also raises very significant amounts of private corporate money through the High Tech High Foundation which raises money for their network of HTH charters. According to the HTH annual report:

“Donations help us limit enrollment and keep our schools smaller than traditional public classrooms;
Donations increase Teacher Classroom Budgets allowing access to innovative tools and experiences;
Donations outfit Maker Spaces/ Labs with contemporary equipment adding to the authentic nature of student work;
Grants support programs in Aftercare, College Advising, Sports Teams, STEM, Robotics, Internship, Inclusion services, Parent Education, Field Trips, Art of all kinds and much, much more.”

Here’s a partial list of corporate donors: http://www.hightechhigh.org/support/supporters.php

A lot of people went to the documentary, and loved what they saw. What they don’t understand is that this is essentially a private school funded in part by the public and in part by extensive, massive, large, enormous amounts of private money in order to create smaller class sizes and a rich curriculum, which would be impossible to create in a small school for the same per-student cost as a large one.

Do you think post-it notes and “maker” supplies are free? How about laptops? Not free. CAD software? Also not free. What about all the cool maker-ish looking stuff that hangs off the carefully exposed beamed ceilings? Not free.

The only way to make this work is to either bleed that money out of the district itself and create massive inequalities in our high schools or to raise private funding, which is currently not allowed by our board policies. Undoing the PIE compromise for this school will mean undoing it for all schools as the parents with greater resources at Paly suddenly demand to be able to donate money directly to their childrens’ classrooms like is allowed at McGee Academy.

High Tech High is great. It costs more money to produce that experience in a small school than it does in a large school. Use your brains, supposedly smart Palo Alto parents: This is basically Nueva School. Do you understand that Nueva School costs $40K per year per student? You cannot have a small school without having some revenue stream that makes it possible. And in a public school district those kinds of inequalities are unacceptable. If they were to be allowed, it would have to be through a fully inclusive public process that really exposes all the issues and problems and inequities it will create.

That’s why HTH is a charter school. Because it has to be created by people who don’t care that it is going to create inequalities of a very large magnitude and who are prepared to do the fundraising necessary to bring that into being.

So, PAUSD parents who are signing up on the facebook page for McGee Academy/Wayfinder — there are only about 140 of you. You are charter school proponents. Do you know that? Do you understand that McGee/Wayfinder is essentially a charter school movement? That you are signing up to open a Palo Alto Charter School which will take funds from PAUSD and funnel them into a quasi-private charter school?

Max McGee is over his head. He has thrown in with an active charter school movement. If he wants to cooperate and give them what they want (the Cubberley building, the ability to raise private money by destroying PIE, smaller classes, more per student funding) then they are happy to have his support. It saves them the legal fees from a bruising Charter School fight. But they don’t probably much care if they have to have the fight and they are gearing up for it I am sure. Look at their application — they are mostly charter school people. Read the application: it’s all about how much better charters are.

If McGee were to withdraw district support from this application, it would be immediately transformed into a charter school application. Do you think that these people will just go away? No. They will continue as a Charter Application. They already have a name, a design committee, and a board. They are ready to roll. Their XQ application can be transformed into a charter application with the deletion of three sentences and the removal of Max McGee. Without anyone on the application who can speak for the district, it is automatically a charter application — it is an application from a group of parents and charter advocates who want to open a publicly funded school in Palo Alto. That’s an entity that has a name.

It’s a charter school.

So, what does this mean. Not to be too alarmist, but it means that there is a fully formed, up and running, charter movement in Palo Alto, headed up by Kevin Efrusy and Mark Romer. It means that the members of the secondary school EMAC committee- a group that by the way includes ZERO parents of high school students but only elementary parents who collectively have zero hours experience with Paly and Gunn and probably fear sending their small children to those “big schools”, people who have not yet parented teenagers let alone current high school students.

They aren’t wrong in thinking it would be cool to build a HTH here in Palo Alto. They are wrong in thinking it can be done with out a charter or private school.

So. Are you people liking the facebook page and emailing the board members ready to launch a charter school against PAUSD? Are you ready to demand a big chunk of the PAUSD budget and space be given to you? Are you ready for the massive community outrage it will spark? If so, that’s fine. If not, now is your chance to reconsider because right now you are on the precipice of creating a huge community rift that will engulf the district in infighting and controversy for years to come.

This only has one endgame. This cannot be done as a “choice” school. It has to spend more per student to be do-able. It can’t make it work without being able to break the union, train their own teachers, hire noncertificated staff, (in Wayfinder’s parlance ‘flexible contracts’) have smaller classes, and spend private money. That isn’t a PAUSD school that is a charter.

Congratulations Max McGee after only one year in PAUSD you have literally brought it to the brink of destruction. In the words of Admiral Ackbar, “It’s a trap!”

I think @optimists has a very ethically consistent argument. He or she is supporting a charter school as a way to force the district to make the changes that some group of parents want. That was also the argument for Mandarin Immersion — and please take note that Grace Ma, the last person to threaten a charter school to get what she wanted, is on the EMAC committee.

In the case of MI, there was no need to really have a charter school. They didn’t actually want a charter school — they wanted exactly what they got, an MI program in a PAUSD school, like SI. That has the same per pupil costs, while Wayfinder appears to require private money to make it work.

It seems worth noting that @optimist appears to be proving @ackbar’s point — this is really a charter school movement masquerading as a PAUSD choice school. If you just read the XQ application with its paen to charters and its mention of “flexible union contracts” and having to seek a-g approval which it might or might not get, it’s pretty clear. This is a charter application. @optimists seems to be saying “yes! about time! bring it on!” What about everyone else? And what to do with a superintendent who has created this mess?

This is me: https://youtu.be/4F4qzPbcFiA

I think it’s pretty clear that this is a Charter School group. California charter school laws are extremely favorable to charters. It is extremely easy for a wealthy group of backers to establish a charter. Palo Alto could in theory establish a charter school and give admission preference to PAUSD students and then establish a low-income preference that would enable it to hit the diversity benchmark (which is incredibly low anyway). In a high school of 500 students, only 35 latino/a students and 15 African American students would be required in order to achieve the ‘diversity of the district in which it is located’ that it must achieve by law.

You can see why PAUSD is an attractive place for a charter school. There are millionaires and billionaires who want their children to attend such a school, which can also provide preference for the children of teachers and board members. They can donate unlimited money to it (and then write it off their own taxes as a 501(c)(3) foundation). They can siphon funds from PAUSD to cover more than half the operating expenses, and they can demand and receive facilities of equal quality to those provided to non-charter students in the district.

If PAUSD denies their application, they can appeal to the county where they will have it approved. The law gives very little basis for turning down a charter application. There is almost no discretion. If Wayfinder submitted an application it would succeed. Period. They would demand and get Cubberley and they would demand and get our money.

The only thing stopping this kind of thing in the past is that it would be seen as an attack on the district. But what if the Superintendent agreed that it was a good idea, and set up a situation where it was the citizens and the Superintendent versus the board. Remember the line from the Wayfinder proposal about “school board political process where inertia and conservativism are trusted defaults”? McGee was an author of that line. McGee is a proponent of this thing. McGee has led us into the maw of destruction.

Surprising that in Palo Alto, the Admiral has to be explained. #notsonerdynation

It’s a trap.

@Admiral, if you gross over $300K, you cannot write things off your taxes as much as you think. (See Pease Limitation.)

I have a rough back of the envelope calculation of what a McGee Academy/Wayfinder would cost if it was a charter school. Charter school funding in a basic aid district works as follows:

– The charter would receive, directly from the district (paid through the County), an amount equivalent to the revenue limit funding for each enrolled student. The average statewide per-pupil expenditure for California this year is $13,462 (page 19: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2015-16/pdf/BudgetSummary/Kthru12Education.pdf).

Basic aid districts receive no backfill from the state (which non-basic aid districts receive) for any of that money. Therefore, charters have a more negative impact on basic aid districts then revenue limit districts.

– Under the Ed Code, we would also have to negotiate with McGee/Wayfinder over giving them part of our basic aid money in excess of revenue limit, as well as part of our parcel tax, and even part of our PIE dollars. That negotiation would be the subject of a protracted legal battle that could itself cost millions and would likely end with an arbitration which we lost on the basic aid dollars.

– We are required to provide equivalent facilities. This is a very big deal. Take a look at the fabulous new Paly Media Arts Center and the performing arts center and the Gunn science classrooms and the Gunn “central building project.” Oh boy. Those are awesome. We have to give a charter stuff that is equally good. We would have to float a bond to build this charter school. Read that last sentence again. Now read it again.

This is at least $10million per year for 1000 students, back of envelope, not counting legal fees (another 2 million judging from Bullis Charter’s impact on LASD) and not counting the bond we will have to float to cover renovating Cubberley to give them equivalent facilities.

This is a mortal threat. I am not being alarmist.

PAEA should wake up because if this happens we have to fire $10,000,000 worth of teachers.

Parents should wake up and stop playing with fire. You are going to require the district to fire guess which teachers? The newest youngest most enthusiastic and least burned out teachers — the new fun cool teachers you love? Forget it, under union rules they are last hired and they are gone.

Maybe they can get nonunion jobs teaching their old students at McGee Academy.

Wake up Palo Alto. Max McGee let the fox into the hen house. Stop emailing the board about wanting Wayfinder and start emailing them about wanting them to save our schools, repel this threat, not renew McGee’s contract, and then figure out how to improve our existing schools through an appropriate community process.

Do not let this happen. Tell your neighbors not to be duped into unwittingly joining a charter school project like the EMAC committee members were.

@slow down

Yes we all know how blackmail works. Evidently we have now entered the phase in which the district and public try to offer things to the supporters of McGee Academy/Wayfinder (including Slow Down judging from her comments above on this and other threads) in order that they do not execute the hostage, i.e., file a charter application.

It is a startling coincidence that Grace Ma, the inventor of the dark art of threatening PAUSD with a charter to get her way, is on this committee and that MI parents attend Ohlone and do not want to leave Ohlone for a new home, even if they get an immersion middle school — supposedly their goal — because they like the project based learning focus. Smart money says that the final proposal will recommend that MI be part of the offerings at McGee Academy/Wayfinder.

How much of a lottery are our choice options today? Do those w siblings get first dibs? Donors? How do we know it’s a fair selection process?

@concerned parent – I have heard something similar, and agree it doesn’t make much sense. No one brown or black or poor was involved on the EMAC (just as no principals or teachers were involved), so it is fair to say that noone really knows. And yes, if it is a lottery school, it would be difficult (impossible?) to give preference to disadvantaged kids, even if one assumes they want to attend or that somehow it would be more effective for them.

Let’s face it – the EMAC proposal is the Wayfinder proposal, which is essentially a charter proposal, designed by and for a group of families who want a certain kind of education for their own kids – in short, Ohlone High School (or Nueva South, take your pick). There in fact is nothing wrong with that idea, except that, with the Superintendent’s active support, they hijacked an advisory committee without telling anyone and used it to promote their cause. The idea hasn’t been properly vetted, not to mention weighed against all the alternatives, like hiring more staff, decreasing class size, and nurturing innovation at our existing schools. We need to thank the EMAC for its work, shut it down, and set up an inclusive and objective group to make recommendations that can stick.

@Slow Down, Hoover is 72% Asian, 10% white, 7% Latino/a, and 0.7% black as of the most recent School Accountability Report Card, see: https://www.pausd.org/sites/default/files/pdf-school/sarc/SARC_Hoover.pdf

I was not aware of how segregated Hoover has become until you asked and I looked it up. I think this is a big problem that should be addressed. This is too concentrated in terms of one ethnic group into one school. Self-segregation is still segregation. The school district should not maintain a school option like then when it knows that the end result is diminishing the diversity of other schools and this school. Where neighbhoorhoods are segregated, a choice school can be an effective tool for integration. But here, the choice school is doing the opposite. It should not be allowed to go on this way.

The EMAC elementary committee that focused on the problems of Barron Park having an unrepresentative population (not enough Asian students) could just as easily have focused on the distorting effect of Hoover in segregating Asians into Hoover rather than in their neighborhood school (BPES). I think it would be a good idea to look at Hoover and the obviously racially segregated pattern there. It is not something a public school district should do. Even if that was not the intention behind it to concentrate Asian students (and it probably was) it is undeniably the result and it is getting more concentrated over time.

This is diminishing the diversity and it is completely unbalanced and out of proportion to the rest of the district.

What exactly is Hoover offering in terms of educational program? It seems like what it is likely really offering is a Chinese-majority school. What is “direct instruction” anyway? At Terman, they have abanonded this except in name for at least 10 years. The teachers determined that it was dumb and didn’t want to do it so they just stopped but let parents think it was continuing rather than have the fight. The DI strand and the regular strand are identical.

Hoover has some self-segregation, though one might look at the actual composition of its neighborhood – possibly more ethnic Asian that other parts of PAUSD. Most Hoover students come from nearby.

If we are going to talk about self-segregation, let’s not leave out Ohlone. It has the highest % white and the lowest % economically disadvantaged (3%) of all the elementary schools.

In almost all cases, choice will create/support self-segregation – this should certainly be a factor in considering any new choice secondary school.

BTW, I did not see anything in the EMAC reports that said Barron Park has “not enough Asians” (not sure what that means). I believe their argument was that it had a higher mix of low income, English learners, and kids with IEPs, plus a lower percentage of neighborhood students actually attending.

@Fred Hoover is a choice school, but what it is offering is an alternative for Asian parents living in its neighborhood, not a pedagogical alternative. Only 21 students attend Hoover from north of Oregon Expressway, 3 from Escondido and 10 from Nixon. Contrast that to 98 from Fairmeadow, 88 from Palo Verde, 60 from Briones, 50 from Barron Park, and 40 from El Carmelo. So hardly anyone from outside Hoover’s extended neighborhood is attending Hoover. All of the choice schools have some neighborhood bias, but nothing like Hoover. Essentially, Asian parents in the Hoover area have 2 choices: attend an integrated school, or an Asian school.

@Fred, the elementary EMAC Q/A from Greta Olbrich referred to the “segregation” of the Barron Park School due to what the EMAC considered the high concentration of ELL, Special Ed, and SED students — that is, Hispanic, disabled, and poor students, mostly in the bodies of the same group of students. She points out that Barron Park has three times the proportion of poor students as the PAUSD average of 8%, and she calls this “demographic segregation” which has what she calls “an extreme population imbalance” that has a negative effect on achievement.

See: https://www.pausd.org/sites/default/files/pdm-meeting/materials/pkt_151026.pdf

The entire point of this recommendation to create a choice program in STEAM at BP is to attract and retain the students who are exiting the neighborhood. The majority of those students are going to Hoover, and it is very likely that 72% of those are Asian. If Hoover were not an option, those 50 students, mostly Asian, would attend Barron Park. That would accomplish all of the goals of the EMAC — in the words of the EMAC, it would add 50 students who are from “a better-served, more stable population” and therefore “might eventually have a better achievement overall.”

If Hoover did not exist, higher achieving better resourced students would attend their neighborhood school in Barron Park, and would raise achievement, provide a stable population to prevent inflows, etc. Rather than creating a choice program to attract students into BP, just transform Hoover into a neighborhood school rather than a “choice” that is attracting the Asian students out since it is basically a segregated Asian school that is diminishing the diversity of Barron Park and other area schools.

Did the EMAC consider that I wonder?

@not a lottery

Actually it’s worse than you think. Wayfinder is not Ohlone. McGee wants to open Wayfinder as a k-12. That would mean that the Ohlone students would have little chance at the middle school. There would be a lottery for kindergarten, and then a lottery due to attrition at 6th grade, and then a lottery due to attrition at 9th grade. That’s it. The Ohlone families who are pushing for Wayfinder have outsmarted themselves because unless the middle school has a new lottery that has no preference for continuing students from Wayfinder elementary Ohlone students will have little to no shot at this school.

Given this, it seems very likely that the real plan behind the scenes is that Ohlone would be moved to Cubberley, and the current Ohlone building could be converted to a neighborhood school. Ohlone could be Wayfinder elementary with priority given to elementary students for secondary enrollment. That would explain why all the Ohlone parents want the new school — since if they can’t go there, it would be weird for them to be pushing for it. It would also explain why the Mandarin Immersion group was happy with this recommendation — they go where Ohlone goes, so they would also go to Wayfinder.

The only problem with this scenario is that many people think that “they” will have priority there. The dollar has clearly been spent quite a few times. The Ohlone families, VTP kids, and neighborhood residents are all groups who have been mentioned as having a preference at Wayfinder/McGee Academy.

As a result of the backroom dealings and side deals and lack of transparency, when the dime actually drops, many people will feel cheated.

As a PA teacher I can tell you unequivocally that the number one thing that we can do to make the school experience better for our students is lower class size. As in *dramatically* lower. I have taught classes with as few as 20 students and as many as 34, and there is absolutely no question that it is a markedly different experience for everyone involved. For the teacher, it is the difference between having a manageable group of students with whom you can actually develop relationships, and subsequently enjoy real guidance and teaching/learning, and having a large group of cats that need to be herded in unison. For the students it is the difference between having a teacher who can actually spend some time with you, and being a number.

If this community really wanted to “put its money where its mouth is”, we would need to massively expand the number of *qualified* teachers and the amount of space we are using at our schools. This would be extremely expensive. But we could do it if we had the political will. It’s not like we don’t have the resources. Instead we spend a lot of time pointing fingers and blaming. At least here anyway.

@Fred

Interesting table. I agree that Ohlone lacks some diversity as well. However, Hoover is the least diverse school in the district (at least using the pan-Asian term “Asian”). 79% Asian — there is no other school in the district that is 79% any one ethnic group. Most of the schools in the south are 40ish% white and 40ish% Asian and 8ish% Latino and 2-3% African American. Barron Park is the most diverse with 30% Latino, 30% Asian, and 30% white. However, given that Barron Park is in the south, there are “missing” Asian and white students and according to the EMAC report, the “missing” Asians went to Hoover and the “missing” whites may have gone to Ohlone.

It is just odd to me that the EMAC Elementary said that Barron Park was “segregated” and had an imbalance when it is actually perfectly balanced at 30/30/30 while Hoover is clearly segregated and imbalanced — it sticks out like a sore thumb of ethnic segregation looking at Table 6.

Rather than add to traffic by creating yet another choice program in BP, which as you point out can never be removed World Without End Amen, what about transforming Hoover into a 100% neighborhood preference “choice” school to see if the ethnic imbalance can be addressed. In that case, you could redraw the attendance boundaries for impacted Palo Verde, give some of that south area as a “neighborhood” to Hoover (which would be ~50% Asian but not 79%) and then gave 100% neighborhood preference to attend Hoover. Then Barron Park students could enter the lottery with everyone else for any leftover Hoover slots, which would be few, and most of them (50 mostly Asian and white kids) would attend Barron Park. Problem solved.

What do you think?

Fred,

The students who have made Ohlone their “choice” for elementary school:

You said 3% are economically disadvantaged. Compare that 3% at Ohlone to the 10% of PAUSD students who are economically disadvantaged overall.

9% attending Ohlone are African American or Hispanic students, quite a bit lower than those two races are in PAUSD overall (16%) too.

So:

Project based learning does not appear to be something widely or even proportionately embraced by our low income or African American and Hispanic communities. There is no reason to believe that their interest in Wayfinder will be any different. This is the self-segregation you refer to.

If your 3% economically disadvantaged are all African American or Hispanic students, for every 1 minority student who is low income there will be 2 minority students there who are NOT low income. If it is half that (1.5%), the ratio will be 1 (low income minority) to every 6 (not low income minority).

PAUSD minority family income overall in comparison: 1 (low income) to every 1 (not low income).

So Ohlone is vastly different than the rest of the district in the family income of its minority students too.

If the achievement gap more closely aligns with family income than race as many scholars now believe, on day one Wayfinder will have pretty much closed the gap just by having a really high number of minority students who are not low income (2 to 6 times more than those attending PAUSD’s other schools).

That is one way to close the gap, and it avoids the school having to figure out how to teach students more or better.

Was this recommendation made by the Superintendent and/or adopted by the Board? I believe the Super did not endorse all the MATD AC recommendations.

“MINORITY ACHIEVEMENT AND TALENT DEVELOPMENT ADVISORY COMMITTEE
REPORT” Recommendation:

“Create an enrollment plan for Voluntary Transfer Program students. They would be
placed with targeted schools in each cluster; North, South and West. The targeted sites would receive extra funding for bus duty and professional development on how to create Identity Safe classrooms. This would help lower racial isolation of Voluntary Transfer Students” Web Link

Can someone explain what has gone on to me?
The decision to establish a charter or quasi charter school would be a monumental policy decision for PAUSD. The board was not supportive of the initiative when they first heard about the proposal a week or so ago. Were they aware of the application by Wayfinder for a grant from XQ that had already been endorsed by their superintendent without the knowledge or approval of the board?
This clearly seems to be an important policy decision. Can anyone remind me who sets policy for PAUSD, the superintendent or the elected body?

Thanks to Another Teacher.
The proponents appear to be hoping they can use McGee’s support to accomplish what would be a charter school in everything but name. Their application to XQ makes that clear.
I remain mystified how a superintendent could endorse such a move without transparency, public discussion or the concurrence of the board. Perhaps this will finally cause the board to act as if they are the actual governing body with responsibility for setting policy.

Choice for the few,

It doesn’t take a rocket science degree to figure out that the pieces won’t fall in place for a PAUSD choice school at Cubberley or for a charter school before XQ’s April deadline.

So the only way XQ stays alive as a possible funding source is if this new project based learning choice program is run by PAUSD on a campus that is running a school now.

Why:

Dr. McGee needs school board approval for PAUSD to open this school. If there is going to be an expensive new campus built – $60 million or more in construction costs for Cubberley right? – he also needs another winning school bond measure to pay for it. Even if both of those come through, that will be well after XQ winners are selected this April.

The non-PAUSD Wayfinder team members can modify the XQ application by swapping “charter school” everywhere “PAUSD” appears. But if Wayfinder turns into a charter, it won’t be able to get the necessary charter approvals by XQ’s April deadline either. Bullis took at least 7 months to get approved.

Fred,

Where do you get the idea that Ohlone’s the whitest school? It’s not. Addison is. Ohlone is second, but by less than a percentage point than Duveneck. I’m not sure you can claim self-segregation when whites are a minority as they are at Ohlone (and at every other elementary besides Addison).

Hoover’s 10 percent is an outlier; Ohlone’s 46 percent is not–it’s within 10 percent of most of the elementaries.

As for economically disadvantage–Tinsley kids are assigned spots across the district, with a couple of clumps–Escondido’s SI program and Walter Hays. The percentage is low, in part, because Ohlone’s so damned big and Tinsley kids aren’t going to qualify as native-Mandarin speakers, whereas they might qualify as native Spanish speakers. Ohlone has more VTA kids than the other schools in the South cluster and underprivileged kids have less of an achievement gap at Ohlone than any of the other schools in the districts.

And, yes, 90 percent of the VTA students at Ohlone are in the Ohlone-main program.

As for the Minority Task Force Recommendation, does anyone seriously think the district is going to create “identity safe” schools for VTA kids? You think local residents are going to be happy when the test scores of their neighborhood school drops because that school has been designated a focus school for poor kids from out-of-town (non-voters)?

It would be political suicide; it’s not going to happen.

Re: charters. Yes, a charter could be forced on Palo Alto, but that doesn’t mean the charter would get Cubberley. The charter doesn’t even have to be in Palo Alto. If the district *does* open up a choice program, though, it won’t be a charter in all but name only. The district has quite a bit more say over choice schools than it would over a charter. Most importantly, a choice school is limited to kids in the district (and the VTA and teacher kids).

Choice,

I’m aware of how charters work–I researched it pretty thoroughly when PACE blackmailed the board with a charter threat for Mandarin Immersion. In case you don’t remember, the majority of the board said it would vote no on MI–and PACE came back with the charter and forced the board’s hand.

But here’s the thing–the threat of a charter is there no matter what McGee’s doing–you’re not saying anything that wasn’t true five years ago. All that’s really different now is that Silicon Valley money has a new interest in taking over education.

If the board turns down a charter application, then the charter proponents can go to the county and force a charter (The county BoE has been very charter friendly.) and, no, it doesn’t have to be in Palo Alto (see how Bullis has been bounced about for an example.)

And, yes, there can be in-district preferences, but a charter can also push to be bigger and take out-of-district kids–the problem with that here is that we’re a basic-aid district. We’d only get general-revenue payments for out-of-district kids, which is substantially less than we spend on kids in-district.

So, let’s switch this around and say that the board *does* approve a new choice high school. Will it be a charter school in everything, but name only?

Well, first of all, out-of-district kids who aren’t in the Tinsley/faculty categories aren’t going to be let in, which is a benefit in terms of budget and traffic. Second, the district gets a say re: curriculum and structure–an open lottery could be required at each school level. Third, the union contracts would apply. It would, in fact, be easier to convert a choice school into a neighborhood school if need be.

Fourth–and this is key–it is *much* harder to convert an existing school to a charter than to open one. You have to have a majority from both the faculty and the parents to pull it off. There’s a reason you don’t hear much about it.

In some ways, this all goes back to Skelley’s mismanagement. He allowed huge schools to be built and ignored the numerous social/emotional issues that arose. So, now we have a high-achieving school district where a sizable minority are dissatisfied with the schools. We also have an underused high-school campus.

It’s no surprise that serious money has come sniffing around. The question is what are we going to do about it?

I’m sorry you don’t make sense. They want this to be in Palo Alto so that they can offer in-district preference. They aren’t going to make it bigger. They want a small school. Are you not following the discussion, all of which is about wanting a small school. There is absolutely demand to fill a 500 HTH Charter in Palo Alto, with Palo Alto student-only preference. The reason they want it here is the money that is present here. If they move it to Sunnyvale or even Mountain View they won’t get the kind of dollars in parent donations they will get in Palo Alto.

That will suck the life out of PIE but whatever, that’s the least of it.

Also, Palo Alto has a bunch of available facilities, which they are drooling over. I don’t know how closely you are following this Max McGee actually took Mark Romer and the other Wayfinder Team members to meet with Jim Keene and other city staff to discuss the future of Cubberley with Bob Golton. I don’t know if you can even characterize that as asleep at the switch. This is more like anesthetized, drunk, on drugs, passed out cold, concussion-level and possibly dead at the switch.

Is a charter the worst thing that could happen to PAUSD?

No. the worst thing would be being blackmailed by this group into giving in to their demands rather than give them a charter. At least with a Charter we aren’t required to create and maintain significant inequities within district in class size and resources and private donors and the Board won’t have to look the voters in the eye and say “we screwed you and then we didn’t fire Max because we are cowards who don’t understand what governance means.”

How’s that for a Christmas present, PAUSD?